Riveting stuff!

[graham.hilder@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Graham Hilder)]

After I grumbled about Alfa's use of pop rivets all over the place
in Alfettas, there were some replies......

In Digest 73, Ken wrote:
"There are a lot of Ferrari owners that would take exception to the
concept of pop riveting being a cheapskate form of assembly. Pop
rivets replace sheet metal screws and other small screws that are
too small to torque, hence they loosen. Pop rivets will stay tighter
than small screws. Also, in aircraft assembly the tensile rating on
aircraft quality pop rivets is really impressive.

And then in no.75, Les wrote:
"......... it appears that we'll never educate the authorities let alone
the masses to structural strength principles. Race cars use rivets,
GTAs were rivetted, Boeing uses rivets........ "


Well whoa there you guys, hang on a minute mate....... I wasn't
moaning about any structural strength issue. I was moaning about
cheap and shoddy build-practice in non-structural areas, not
about any lack of strength. I should have given some examples.
At the moment it's been a while since I spent a lot of time working
specifically on the Alfetta, so the rivets which annoy me aren't
fresh in my mind right now, and off the cuff  the only example I
can think of is the plastic grille mounted by rivets, requiring
fasteners to be DRILLED OUT to do an elementary job like grille
removal. You can hardly claim there was any structural strength
issue involved here...!! 
OK, I can only think of that one example right now, but I know
that far too often when I've had to do some or other
common-or-garden job on the Alfetta, I've come across some jolly
rivets I've had to drill out, where in a comparable situation another
car would have had the good taste to use screw fasteners.....
another car such as, oh, I dunno, an Alfasud for example eh ?  

Now, Ken and Les gave me a hard time (for the wrong reason, as it
happened), but Robert Jones signed off one of his postings like
this : 

>Robert Jones,
>1979 Alfetta GTV 2000
>(with modified body - all pop rivets that I have found
                                          have been replaced by screws! :-)

Good man!  That's the spirit!  Let's carry on the fight to make our
Alfettas into the cars they should be!

Rgds all,
Graham H,
New Zealand.
GTV, Alfetta, Alfasud.

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